


creature of habit

by theultimateburrito



Series: camp howling ground [2]
Category: Sleepaway (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Crafter Playbook - Freeform, Fire, Gen, Introspection, Ropeskeeper Playbook, Smoking, Summer Camp, unusual friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:27:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26012617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theultimateburrito/pseuds/theultimateburrito
Summary: Like flies to honey, so too are the area teen smokers to the kids who tote around lighters. A bond naturally occurs among the bad kids, symbiotic.
Series: camp howling ground [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1918555
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6
Collections: Camp Howling Ground (Sleepaway 2020 campaign)





	creature of habit

Lately, and she isn’t sure why, Sinclair can’t stop looking at fire. 

It starts around the campfire, her voice easing to a complete stop while the voices around her fade away into white noise. While the world seems to go on around her, it feels like Sinclair is caught in the sensation of having a word on the tip of your tongue, a faint glimmer of knowing. It feels like a direction, like she and the center of the fire where it’s hottest and new have some sort of understanding about where that leads. Watching the shape of it dance and flicker against the night sky, it gives her mind a chance to wander far from here, up and away as it dissipates and fades into nothing.

Just like that, in a particularly bright flicker, she’s back. Looking around, no one seems to notice. There's relief in that. She doesn’t think she'd be able to describe it to the other campers quite right, even if she wanted to. 

None of it makes sense, but it doesn’t have to. She’s not telling.

Usually the nighttime is when she sneaks out to go smoke by the woods, but the past week has taken on a different color. Lately she’s just been staring at her lighter instead, flicking at it idly, feeling the cast of its strange, small glow beneath her face, trying to read something wordless. It’s another one of those nights, trying to grab for more of the feeling that the campfire gives her, contained secretively within her hands, palm cupped around the tiny flame. 

“Hey,” a flat voice says behind her.

Sinclair turns around, fast, to face the sound. In the event that someone stumbled on her, Sinclair had made the effort to lean coolly against the nearest tree. Now that someone had-- the quiet kid who always sits out of dodgeball, staring out into the woods-- she doesn’t feel very cool at all. Just feels kind of weird.

Flicking her lighter closed, she adjusts her posture. “Uh, hey?” 

The girl takes her hands out of her pockets, an unlit cigarette between the fingers of one and a crumpled up carton in the other. Sinclair gives her a once-over, trying to follow along. 

“My lighter’s busted,” She shakes the carton in her hand at Sinclair like a parent shaking their keys to get a kid’s attention. “I’ll give you one if you give me a light.”

She might feel condescended if she didn’t know the value of that currency.

Camp is technically, spiritually, supposed to be a trading of stories or intricately woven bracelets-- kid stuff, you know. So it’s a bit of a rush to usher the girl in front of her forward in offering, make an exchange, strike a deal. Sinclair flicks her lighter open again and that’s enough invitation for the girl to lean forward, the skin of her cheek nearly brushing against Sinclair’s cupped hand.

Something in the way the flame twitches, Sinclair knows that there’s something more to this. Or, maybe there _will be_. It’s on the tip of her tongue. 

The girl retreats away from the glow of the flame and breathes a lungful of smoke into the air. Doesn’t cough. Without fanfare she wiggles the tips of her fingers into the carton, and holds a single cigarette out to Sinclair. 

“Thanks. Deal’s a deal.”

Sinclair just looks at it, proof of insurance that this girl won’t snitch, and looks back up at her eyes. They look far away, even so close.

“What’s your name?” 

“Are you gonna take it or not?” 

“C’mon, it’s no big deal.” What’s in a name, or some junk like that. 

The girl thinks about it, rolls the idea around in her head. She’s all reservation and hesitance, like one long, slow flinch. Then, an opening.

“Valentine,” she says. “Just Valentine.” 

\--

The flat stretch of pine beneath Sinclair’s back isn’t comfortable by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s comforting-- big difference there. It’s a feeling akin to the therapeutic qualities of laying flat against bathroom tile; everything just clicks into place, mentally and physically. A literal and spiritual spinal alignment, if you will. Her legs dangle over the edge of the platform, about 50 feet off the ground on the northwest corner of the ropes course, idly swaying forward and back, forward and back, luxuriating in the sensation of absolutely nothing underfoot. It’s comforting sure enough, and Sinclair needs all the comfort she can get these days. 

The sight of a camper’s-- Steven-- of Steven’s dead body doesn’t exactly sit well in her brain. Something like that just can’t find a comfortable spot. 

Bringing her hand up to her mouth, she takes a quiet drag off of the cigarette between her fingertips, before bringing it back to rest atop her chest. Hand over heart, like a miniature pledge of allegiance to the middle of nowhere, to this little sliver of quiet. This spot has all the grounding qualities of smoking in the boys room without having to stand next to the vent, fan on, courtesy of this thing we call the great outdoors. This, Sinclair thinks, is what the best of both worlds must be. 

She blows a thin stream of smoke upward and watches it get carried off on the wind-- out of sight, out of mind.

“What are you doing?”

Sinclair feels the board beneath her head shift under someone else’s weight. She tilts her head back to look, hair catching a bit on the woodgrain. Upside down, standing on the ceiling of her vision, Valentine is looking down at her, glaring. That disapproval doesn’t change no matter what angle you’re looking at it from. 

How highschool.

“You’re awful quiet, you know that?” Sinclair asks, smoke gracelessly pouring out of her mouth as she talks, like a broken fog machine. 

“Yeah, I’m pretty aware,” Valentine waves her hand in front of her face, dispelling any smoke that wafts up to her. “That doesn’t explain why you’re here.” 

“Figured you could tell,” Sinclair says. It’s enough to make Valentine squint at her more. 

They hadn’t been close when they were campers-- Sinclair ran with the big wolves and was too concerned with keeping herself in the pack to bring outliers into the fold. Valentine was content to stay a wallflower anyway, slipping silently away into the woods while everyone was watching, as quiet then as she is now. Even so, she remains a permanent fixture in Sinclair’s memory. Like flies to honey, so too are the area teen smokers to the kids who tote around lighters. A bond naturally occurs among the bad kids, symbiotic.

“I didn’t say you could smoke in my forest.” 

“It’s _our_ forest, don’t you remember the camp songs?” Sinclair gives it a second. Then takes a deep breath, “ _Thiiiiis place we’ve built--_ ” 

“Jesus, don’t,” Valentine glances around them, watchful. It’s fine though, they’re far enough out. It’s whatever either way, but the sudden wash of anxiety at being seen and heard is something Sinclair has worked pretty damn hard to get rid of, and it nags at her to see that look on Valentine’s face. So she lays her head back down again and stares up at the stars instead. Now that’s a pretty picture. 

“No worries, got it out of my system,” With delicacy she places what remains of a cigarette between her lips before laying her hands back to rest, lacing the fingers together. 

The boards creak and shift under her head, her back. For a minute she thinks that Valentine’s given up. But then the shift gets stronger and closer and, oh, she’s taking a seat next to her. Sinclair can’t help but turn her head to face her, trying to gauge the purpose of this little visit. Their legs dangle over the edge together now, about a foot between them. Valentine looks real tired, a bone-deep exhaustion that sleep wouldn’t fix. They’re the same in that way. Empathy crawls into her chest, which leads Sinclair blows a stream of smoke considerately away from the space between them. 

They’re quiet for an awfully long time before the silence crumbles apart. 

“I didn’t know you still smoked,” Valentine says, quietly, like she’s kind of disappointed. Man, that’s a tone that takes her back.

Sinclair can’t help the chuckle that escapes her. Valentine makes a face when she laughs, but the source of it is for her to know and Val to never find out. 

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” She tries to temper the self-satisfaction out of her voice to absolutely no success. But she moves on pretty quick, “Not anymore, really, just when things are rough. I’d say the occasion calls for it.” 

Valentine is quiet. The way she's been all day, but it feels deeper than her usual silence, unintentional. It puts Sinclair in an awkward position; it’s not sitting well in her chest. 

“Well,” Sinclair continues, filling the quiet, hoping it’ll help things. “You know what they say-- when the going gets tough, the tough head out to the woods for a smoke break.” 

“I’ll pass,” Valentine says, so flat that it could knock you over. 

“You quit, huh?”

“Trying.”

“That’s all we can do, right? Good for you, man, really.” Guilt’s starting to seep in the more she thinks about the crumpled carton of cigarettes between them, about how she looks like a damn smokehouse right now. So Sinclair leans forward to stub out the last of her cigarette on the side of the platform--

“Don’t even think about it.”

“ _Touchy_ ,” Sinclair mutters, but she understands. She remembers Valentine raising these platforms, building it herself, like a little ant lifting boards and logs like it was nothing while sweat gathered over her forehead in the summer sun. The memory had slipped away from her, but it makes her feel some unknowable admiration. Makes her kind of feel like shit, too. Both of these feelings are true together. 

In an act of compromise, she stubs the cigarette out on the bottom of her shoe and tucks the butt away to pitch later. There will be no littering in these woods, not even to spite what lurks within. 

At the same time, Valentine shifts to standing and starts walking away, like she’s outgrown this rendezvous. In a way, hasn’t she?

Sinclair sits up as she goes, feels polite. “Oh, you leavin? I swear, I won’t crud the place up.”

Valentine stands on the precipice, looking down at the forest below, at the way the wind bends itself through the trees. Stray threads of her ponytail are caught up in it, threatening to drift off like spider silk.

“Don’t stay too long,” She says, like it was meant to be a threat when the thought started up. Valentine glances back once, and then she’s gone down the rope ladder, quick as she came. 

She doesn’t worry, was never the type, but whatever feeling she feels for Valentine is something approaching it. As she goes, the not-worry goes with her, a hope for safe travels. Without that feeling or another person around, Sinclair is keenly aware of just how alone she is. That much doesn’t feel so fun.

There’s a comfort in old habit, a comfort that Sinclair’s felt more inclined to indulge in lately. Sneaking a smoke here and there, talking with people she was too scared to get close with back in the day, making up for lost time. That might be what all this is at the end of the day-- Camp Howling Ground: Home of Old Habit. The local cryptid: nostalgia. 

God, she wishes the local cryptid were so quaint.

Maybe that’s why she feels inclined to flip open her lighter again, hope that it’ll show her something that the campfire earlier tonight wouldn’t-- a better, kinder future than the road they’re tumbling down. Maybe it’ll be different this time. Maybe if she just wants it bad enough, maybe, maybe, maybe. 

She stares at the unexplainable and waits, quietly, for an answer.

**Author's Note:**

> i cannot stop thinking about this campaign and these scared kids who grew up to be scared adults. love them, all of them.


End file.
